Preface - The Scheme Programming Language, Third Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Preface

Chapter 1 describes the properties and features of Scheme that make it a useful and enjoyable language to use. Chapter 1 also describes Scheme's notational conventions and the typographical conventions employed in this book.

Chapter 2 is an introduction to Scheme programming for the novice Scheme programmer that leads the reader through a series of examples, beginning with simple Scheme expressions and working toward progressively more difficult ones. Each section of Chapter 2 introduces a small set of related features, and the end of each section contains a set of exercises for further practice. The reader will learn the most from Chapter 2 by sitting at the keyboard and typing in the examples and trying the exercises.

Chapter 3 continues the introduction but covers more advanced features and concepts. Even readers with prior Scheme experience may wish to work through the examples and exercises found there.

Chapters 4 through 8 make up the reference portion of the text. They present each of Scheme's primitive procedures and syntactic forms in turn, grouping them into short sections of related procedures and forms. Chapter 4 describes operations for creating procedures and variable bindings; Chapter 5, program control operations; Chapter 6, operations on the various object types (including lists, numbers, and strings); Chapter 7, input and output operations; and Chapter 8, syntactic extension.

Chapter 9 contains a collection of complete example programs or packages, each with a short overview, some examples of its use, the implementation with brief explanation, and a set of exercises for further work. Each of these programs demonstrates a particular set of features, and together they illustrate an appropriate style for programming in Scheme.

Following Chapter 9 are a bibliography, answers to selected exercises, a detailed description of the formal syntax of Scheme programs and data, a concise summary of Scheme syntactic forms and procedures, and the index. The summary of forms and procedures is a useful first stop for programmers unsure of the structure of a syntactic form or the arguments expected by a primitive procedure. The page numbers appearing in the summary of forms and procedures and the italicized page numbers appearing in the index indicate the locations in the text where forms and procedures are defined.

Because the reference portion describes a number of aspects of the language not covered by the introductory chapters along with a number of interesting short examples, most readers will find it profitable to read through most of the material Chapter 6 is lengthy, however, and may be skimmed and later referenced as needed.

An online version of this book is available at Chapter 3) show how two tiles can surround one or even two similar ones and how they can be assembled to generate straight lines, arcs or circles, random paths, or regular paths.

For each of the illustrations, a Scheme program was used to define tiles and placement rules for these tiles, resulting in diverse monohedral spiral and non-spiral tilings of the plane. Monohedral tilings were output directly as plane geometries in Postscript to produce the illustrations appearing at the front of Chapters 1, 4, and 7. For the remaining illustrations, the tilings were warped in various ways and augmented with the help of Geomview (Geometry Center, Minneapolis), which allows for spatial manipulations, insertions, and adjustments in color, perspective, light, and material.

Acknowledgements: Many individuals contributed in one way or another to the preparation of one or more editions of this book, including Bruce Smith, Eugene Kohlbecker, Matthias Felleisen, Dan Friedman, Bruce Duba, Phil Dybvig, Guy Steele, Bob Hieb, Chris Haynes, Dave Plaisted, Joan Curry, Frank Silbermann, Pavel Curtis, John Wait, Carl Bruggeman, Sam Daniel, Oscar Waddell, Mike Ashley, John LaLonde, John Zuckerman, and John Simmons. Many others have offered minor corrections and suggestions. Oscar Waddell helped create the typesetting system used to format the printed and online versions of this book. Fred is no longer with us, but his faithful companionship is not forgotten. Finally and most importantly, my wife, Susan Dybvig, suggested that I write this book in the first place and lent her expertise and assistance to the production and publication of all three editions.

R. Kent Dybvig

Bloomington, Indiana